The Wardian Case: Environmental Histories of a Box for Moving Plants - Notes
The Wardian Case: Environmental Histories of a Box for Moving Plants
Abstract
The Wardian case, invented in 1829, greatly impacted ecology. It enabled the successful transport of live plants between countries and continents. Humans, using Wardian cases in the 19th and early 20th centuries, became the largest movers of vascular plants, surpassing natural Earth processes. This essay highlights the significance of boxes and cases, particularly the Wardian case, in environmental history and links it to contemporary discussions about plant movement in the Anthropocene.
Keywords
Wardian case, Anthropocene, mobility, botany
Introduction
In 1829, Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, an amateur naturalist and doctor, observed a fern seedling and grass sprouting in a closed bottle with moist soil, where he had buried a butterfly chrysalis. This observation led Ward to realize the potential for growing plants in glazed cases, addressing the challenge of propagating ferns in his sooty East London home. The airtight Wardian case, made of glass and wood, allowed plants to survive longer and withstand environmental changes during long-distance transport. Although the concept existed in the 18th century, Ward's innovation combined glass with an enclosed micro-ecosystem. Within three years, Ward cultivated over thirty plant species in these cases. The Wardian case revolutionized plant movement and was used for over a century, yielding significant commercial, industrial, and environmental effects.
Historians of science acknowledge the case's significance, but overlook the scale of plant movement and its consequences. Botanists, horticulturalists, colonists, nurseries, and agriculturalists all utilized the Wardian case. This makes the case an artifact of a crucial period in global environmental change.
Intentions and Invasions
This paper explores the Wardian case as a simple yet complex object utilized across global networks. The global flows of migrants, commodities, and ideas intensified during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Vaclav Smil identifies the diesel engine and gas turbine as key drivers of globalization. The Wardian case serves as an earlier prime mover for plants, facilitating species movement with greater success.
Invasion biologists recognize the Wardian case's role in biological globalization as a 'milestone in botanical innovation' and a 'key vehicle for botanical globalisation'.
Mark Levinson's study of the shipping container highlights the importance of seemingly prosaic objects. Similarly, the Wardian case merits closer attention from environmental historians. Stuart McCook notes the Wardian case resolved a critical bottleneck in long-distance plant transfer. H.F. Macmillan, director of Ceylon Botanic Gardens, praised the Wardian case as the best means for transmitting plants over long journeys.
The Wardian case occupies a 'space in between' as a mover, not a migrant. Alfred Crosby's Ecological Imperialism (1986) highlights the ecological impact of European expansion, with non-human elements playing a central role. Similarly, Elton's The Ecology of Invasion by Animals and Plants (1958) recognizes plants and animals as part of human movement. Since 1800, there has been a marked increase in non-native species, leading to significant biodiversity loss, with economic impacts as high as billion annually.
Approximately % of vascular plants have naturalized outside their natural ranges because of human activities. Humans are the largest dispersers of vascular plants. Understanding species' pathways requires interdisciplinary dialogue, including historical perspectives. While Crosby largely neglected intentional species movements, recent studies emphasize their importance in shaping environmental futures. Eric Pawson uses the metaphor of the web to illustrate the complexity of plant movements. By focusing on the Wardian case, we can observe intentional human interventions in global ecological systems.
The paper is divided into four parts:
History of the Wardian case and well-known plants moved using it.
Design of the case and its co-construction by its users.
The role of local workers and indentured laborers in the use of the Wardian case.
The use of the box by botanic gardens to move plants in colonial networks.
The paper concludes by assessing the role of global technology as an important artefact of the Anthropocene age.
Sending Plants
The Wardian case helped Nathanial Bagshaw Ward maintain his ferns in polluted London. By the 19th century, Wardian cases with ferns became common in middle and upper-class homes. Scottish botanist Allan Maconochie also developed an airtight system for preserving plants, but Ward disputed his claims to the invention. David Allen considers the Victorian fern craze possibly 'the greatest and ultimately most destructive natural history fashion of all'.
In 1851, a Wardian case full of plants was displayed at the Great Exhibition. Darby viewed the Wardian case as an extreme example of the Victorians' artificial manipulation of nature.
Four years after inventing it, Ward tested his case by transporting plants from London to Sydney. In 1833, ship captain Charles Mallard reported the experiment a success. On the return journey, plants were replanted with Australian specimens and transported through diverse temperatures. Ward and George Loddiges witnessed the healthy fronds of a Coral Fern (Gleichenia microphylla) upon the ship's return to London.
John Loudon visited Ward in 1834 and recognized the invention's potential. Ward's monograph, On the Growth of Plants in Closely Glazed Cases (1842), included supporting letters from ship captains.
In 1835, Ward sent ornamental plants and coffee plants to the head gardener for the Pacha of Egypt. George Loddiges circulated over 500 cases globally, establishing the Wardian case as a crucial tool for plant transport. In 1836, Loddiges sent a case to Nathaniel Wallich, Director at the Calcutta Botanic Gardens, who forwarded it to Charles François Brisseau de Mirbel at the Jardin des Plantes. The case was then sent back to India with the Cels family also sending plants to Wallich.
The Horticultural Society of England promoted the Wardian case. In 1848, Robert Fortune used it to acquire tea plants from China which led to the establishment of the tea industry setting the foundations of the Assam and Sikkim tea industry in India. Later, he sent 26,000 tea seedlings in Wardian cases to Washington, D.C., for the United States' first experimental plant station.
The cinchona tree (quinine source) was moved from Bolivia to Java and India and the rubber tree was transplanted from South America to Asia. The dwarf Cavendish banana was moved from China to the South Pacific and Henri Lecomte established gutta percha plantations in French colonies using Wardian cases. Mangoes were introduced to Queensland, Australia, from India, Java, and Bombay using the case.
Constructing Cases
Boxes have been used to move plants for over three centuries. By the late 1700s, John Ellis and Andre Thouin favored a sloping-roof case for plants. In 1824, John Lindley received healthy plants in a case from Mauritius and Nathaniel Wallich used pearl-shell inserts in case roofs for light.
Ward's innovation was the closed system of transporting plants where previous cases allowed fresh air to enter the case. Plants, properly packed, could be sealed and survive long journeys without water.
Ward never patented a design, believing his cases should benefit many. In 1845, he noted the cases' extending use among all classes and their recommendation by the 'Health of Towns Commission'.
The Wardian case was not perfect, requiring instructions and the help of ship captains. On Ward's first shipment, Captain Charles Mallard watered the plants only once. Nurseryman George Loddiges noted failures occurred due to neglect. Ship captains sometimes stored the cases below deck (instead of on the deck), resulting in plant death.
Following its invention, the Wardian case went through various designs including ones from Loddiges nursery using teak from old East India company ships. In general, early cases dimension were inches in length, inches in height, and inches in width with the timber base that held the soil usually only inches deep. Joseph Hooker took a very huge case on the Erebus with him that was almost as tall as a sailor; it never arrived back in London. Smaller cases were easier to handle.
While plants could be sent from Europe in cases based on the pre-determined designs of nurseries and botanical gardens, cases were often constructed onsite from local timber. In 1841, George Gardner took only glass squares to Brazil to have cases made in Rio de Janeiro. James Backhouse had cases made in Hobart, Australia, based on designs dictated from York. The design of the case was not a single unified form.
In 1862, Thomas Lang delivered a lecture in Victoria, Australia, on the cases, transporting nearly a million plants to Victoria in one decade. The audience compared two Wardian cases, one with the typical pitched roof and another a newer, flat-roofed design, that had just arrived in Ballarat from England carrying camellias and orchids. In 1868, Ward complained he never received earning / thanks for his cases.
The Wardian case had many designs and constructions. Shortly after Ward's death, William Bull patented an improved case with openings for greater ventilation. By the 1870s airflow was needed inside cases. Users varied the design according to their needs. Various groups co-constructed the technology, with innovations coming from commercial nurseries.
Unpacking Histories
The practice of sending plants was reliant on actions at the colonial periphery. Local people with botanical knowledge knew where to find plants and how to best transplant these in cases.
When John Gibson used the Wardian cases in India in 1836, he used two local workers from the Khasi Hills named Ram Chund Maulee and Ramnarain Baugh who helped him find and pack plants but then deserted him without wages. Another example is the cinchona plant. Clements Markham paid his collectors unfairly and the cinchona plants in Markham's fifteen Wardian cases would ultimately die in the heat of the Red Sea. Manuel Mamani, collector of Charles Ledger's seeds, was imprisoned and beaten to death in Bolivia.
The laborers are unloading what looks like a shipment of either cacao or rubber seedlings. Over Chinese indentured laborers were brought to work alongside indentured Melanesian workers on Samoa. Chinese workers often protested at the working conditions but were dealt severe penalties for disobedience. One worker, Wong Kim Tiu, worker No. 1239, who had threatened his employer, was handcuffed and tied to the veranda by his pigtail.
The technology being used was copied from a nurseryman in Chelsea. Seeing the use of the Wardian case in Samoa by indentured labourers we witness not only how plants travel but how a technology travels and its impact on distant people.
In Madagascar the French used local people to find and transport plants. In Java the Dutch used local Indonesian workers to construct and create cases in their Buitenzorg gardens. Collecting and moving plants depended on global collaborations that crossed contact zones. At almost every turn, local workers and collectors were key parts to putting plants on the move.
Cases with Consequences
By the late nineteenth century, agriculture became a central part of the colonial project and Wardian cases were required for moving plants to plantations.
Technological developments in Europe aided the spread of imperialism. With the opening of the Suez Canal, freight rates fell by half between 1869 and 1910. The Wardian case found new uses with the expansion of empires.
The field of colonial botany in the age of New Imperialism is vast and global. Kew was the leading example of colonial botany that other nations with imperial ambitions tried to replicate. The German and French colonial gardens drew on Kew's example and used the Wardian case to great effect.
William Hooker imported more plants than in the previous century. Plants were travelling to and from world wide locations and species. Whole environmental processes were literally being moved across oceans. In the early 1880s the bamboo plant Chusquea abietifolia was sent to Kew in a Wardian case and planted in one of the greenhouses. In 1884, Joseph Hooker witnessed it 'suddenly burst into flower'.
In the decade 1891–1901, Kew moved 198 Wardian cases and sent them all over the world; They sent on average about twenty cases per year between 1890 and 1910.
In 1887, Kew received two German visitors who were not botanists but sent by the Deutsch kolonialgesellschaft [German Colonial Society] to investigate the imperial work of Kew. In early 1898, the French also sent a botanist to Kew to talk to Thiselton-Dyer about their work in the colonies. By 1891, the Botanische Zentralstelle für die deutschen Kolonien [Botanical Research Centre for the German Colonies] was officially set up and based at the Berlin Botanic Gardens, modelled on Kew.
By 1910, a total of 240 Wardian cases had been sent by the Germans to their colonies and at least 17,000 plants were sent. These included plants such as coffee, oil palm, sisal, cocoa, gutta percha, rubber and bananas.
In the French Pavilion at the Brussels Exposition Universelle et Internationale of 1910, the French were able to show off the economic plant products they had sent to their colonies. From it's creation, 1899-1909, the Jardin Colonial shipped at least 400 Wardian cases to the colonies: almost twice the number shipped by the Germans and certainly more than Kew over the same period.
At Russia's most prominent gardens in St Petersburg, the German born Carl Maximowicz became head of the botanical gardens which allowed him to develop an extraordinary array of Japanese plants. The United States became one the most important users of the case in the early twentieth century because of extensive use by the United States Department of Agriculture.
These mobilities did not come without consequence. The Wardian case also moved earth and environments. Animals such as the hammerhead flatworm (Bipalium kewense) was hiding in the soil. Sugarcane mosaic virus and coffee rust are two examples found in cases that have devastated crops. In the twentieth century people looked to quarantine and control the movement of species.
On the other hand, the Wardian case was used by entomologists to transport insect species that could act as natural predators on plants and animals. By the 1940s the use of Wardian cases was largely phased out and superseded by the use of polythene bags and temperature controlled air transport.
Artefact of the Anthropocene?
For many historians, the Anthropocene has become widely accepted - the impact of humanity upon the planet has become so great that we are now creating our own geological age. It helps to explain both the post-1950 phase of the 'Great Acceleration' and a longer period dating back to colonial periods and the beginning of the industrial revolution where many processes have their roots.
The Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany, opened the major special exhibition Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands. Within this exhibition the Wardian case appeared as an important object displaying human influence on planetary mobility patterns.
The Wardian case helps us to shift some of our focus toward both material histories and complex stories of mobility. In this broad review of the Wardian case, an attempt has been made to show its extensive use across the globe by many different groups of people: scientists, horticulturalists, nurseries and agriculturalists; as well as Cinchona, tea, rubber, bananas, orchids, and even beetles were the many different plant species being moved. When shifting the focus of studies of the Anthropocene to occur in a transdisciplinary dialogue, artefacts and history help to locate different stories of global change. The Wardian case is but one of these artefacts with a compelling environmental history.